Many finished edible composite products, including but not limited to snacks, crackers, chips, flat breads, tortillas, biscuits, breads, bagels, rolls, pasta, pastries, cereals, pizza, croutons, pretzels, and doughnuts, have developed/evolved over time with a focus on carbohydrate-based material formulations. This focus on carbohydrates (including but not limited to flour, sugar, starch, and derivatives of such) has had a major all-around impact ranging from consumer health and wellness, taste and texture profiles of foods, to the actual manufacturing equipment and process design for such. All are deeply engrained.
To highlight this, equipment materials of construction, engineering design, material handling requirements and systems, process design, recipe creation and product formulation have all developed around these carbohydrate-based products, ingredients, and their processing material characteristics. This leaves all commercial and industrial processes with fixed parameters that require very specific material characteristics (e.g. extensibility) to operate correctly. Without such, there is no finished product.
These carbohydrate-based products have also made a permanent impact on both the conscious and unconscious mind of the consumer regarding taste, texture, and mouth-feel. All are critical for the consumption of food in today's industrialized world. Unfortunately, this same focus on carbohydrate-based foods has also had other unwanted consequences, including an out-of-control increase in human obesity, gastrointestinal health issues (e.g. Irritable Bowel Syndrome), diabetes, and inflammatory diseases. All are directly linked to the excessive proliferation of these inexpensive high-carbohydrate composite foods utilized by the industrialized world population.
As a result, the need for change has become critical for the general public's long-term health and wellness. The difficulty with enacting the necessary “medical wellness” product formulation changes is that simply a change in food ingredients is not an easy matter, nor is it easy to simply substitute of one ingredient for another. Foods must still be palatable, desirable, and digestible. The products must also be capable of being processed on existing manufacturing equipment, ranging from small-scale apparatus and appliances to large industrial-scale equipment. Therefore this nutritive formulation and material technology combination must meet the requirements of the equipment and deliver a food product with taste, texture and mouth-feel characteristics similar to existing carbohydrate-based food products.
Any new food material technology would thus need to be multifunctional, requiring it to both process and taste similar to carbohydrates. Also, in order to be processed, such nutritive composites would need to emulate the material characteristics exhibited by high-carbohydrate composites, including possessing controllable extensibility needed to be processable in common food manufacturing processes, including direct reduction sheeting, lamination sheeting, extrusion, mixing, blending, forming, various molding processes, baking, drying, frying, steaming, retort, high temperature liquid boiling, and more. The processed nutritive composite materials need to be able to withstand being physically subjected to equipment handling, various extrusion techniques, molding processes, and thickness reduction methods on automated process equipment. Standard carbohydrate materials technology, used for these common processes, has been mastered over centuries of engineering, work, and effort. Therefore, these processes and the equipment have been designed for processing of high-carbohydrate materials. There is thus a great need for a material base change in which will yield good tasting, economical, carbohydrate-like nutritive composite.